Moderators should be able to remove / burninate a tag themselves

Question

We're doing some spring cleaning on Super User, which involves disambiguating tags, merging them, creating synonyms etc.

However, one of the most troublesome things is removing a tag.

Often, it's easy enough to agree that a tag should be burninated completely, possibly even blacklisted. But then, we're told that "only devs can do it". From time to time, Trogdor appears and the tag is gone.

Often, there is a list of questions that are currently tagged with something, but need that tag removed. There's no way to do this, currently, without mods needing to step on some dev's toes.

Request:

Diamond moderators should – given community consensus – be able to remove a tag:

• from the site, entirely, or
• a list of questions

Benefits:

• No more mass-retagging and front-page flooding just to remove a tag (e.g. when we'd rather do it manually than wait for a dev to do it)
• Huge amount of time saved
• No need for moderators on smaller sites to get devs to perform the deletion
• The site's own community can make a decision within their own moderation policy

Answer 1

Yes please!

Another option would be giving moderators a mass retag privilege. Retagging a question used to be one of the smallest privileges, attainable at just 500 reputation, so surely we trust the moderators enough to let them mass remove a tag from questions?

Removing tags is a very simple operation. The only reason the job needs moderator/dev/community manager attention in the first place is because some tags have waaaay to many questions to retag all at once (as slhck points out in his question). Is this really something we should need to bother a SE employee about?

Of course, there's also the option of...

Retag parties!

But then, who likes those?

Answer 2

I like the idea of changing things so that moderators can be more autonomous when it comes to tag cleanups. In the same breath, communities need to be more autonomous when it comes to managing synonyms. Our tag management tools haven't seen much love in quite a while, and we need to fix that.

The current obstacle to allowing AMTBs (Autonomous Moderator Tag Burnination) is the fact that our own tools to do it are crazy dangerous. Did you know that I could one-click destroy the very fabric of logic itself? Don't laugh, man, because I totally did just that:

This does:

• No checks to ensure we're not leaving a question untagged
• No checks to make sure we don't remove a problematic tag from something with pending close votes (homework was a major pain to exterminate)
• No sanity to allow an easy undo of the operation

Come to think of it, a lot of the tools we have built around managing tags make me think of something like this:

Wait, sorry, that's Ralph Macchio. They make me think of something like this:

And that's something we need to fix holistically, and something we're going to dive into soon.

For the actual burnination, we'll need to come up with more sane tools on our end that can be exposed to mods, and perhaps make it a two-key operation. Moderator 1 initiates it, moderator 2 ACKs it and turns their key as well.

Not putting planned or deferred on this yet, but we are examining it, other really strange quirks about how the tag management tools work led to a discussion earlier today and we agree - love is needed in this area.

Answer 3

Also surprised the mods can't already do it.

In relation to Lance Roberts' answer, the obvious solution would be to make the deletion process a vote, with a required quorum scaled roughly logarithmically to the tag's popularity - i.e. the more questions tagged, the more voters needed. Very popular tags, like, say, java, should still be dev only I think. All of this is to prevent erroneous deletions, of course.

Note that I'm not yet that familiar with the tag management processes, so I may be talking out of my a**.

Answer 4

What if all tags had a “hidden” flag, so a mod could hide a tag stopping it showing up on any questions, tag lists etc. Then if need be the tag could be unhidden.

Answer 5

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

Removing tags en masse can have huge repercussions. We need to exercise extreme care in doing so, because the size of some of the sites leads to having many edge cases.

I'm not against having some completely trivial tag removed en masse, but want the decision process to go through the Team, so that it will be considered more thoroughly, rather than just having one moderator make the decision.

It would be better for most retags/removals to have things done manually, but it would be nice to have an option when we edit to not bump the post if we choose.